Year In Review 2014–2015

Faculty Essays

Published by Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material CulturePrinted by GHP in Connecticut

Issued August 2015

Dr. Barry BergdollEdward Lee CaveVerónica Hernández de ChicoHélène David-WeillPhilip D. EnglishFernanda KelloggTrudy C. KramerDr. Arnold L. LehmanMartin LevyJennifer OlshinMelinda Florian PappLisa PodosAnn Pyne

Sir Paul RuddockJeanne SloaneGregory SorosLuke SysonSeran TrehanDr. Ian WardropperShelby WhiteMitchell Wolfson, Jr.Philip L. Yang, Jr. Dr. Leon Botstein, ex-officioDr. Susan Weber, ex-officio

Executive Planning Committee

About Bard Graduate CenterFounded in 1993 by Dr. Susan Weber, Bard Graduate Center is a research institute in New York City. Its MA and PhD programs, research initiatives, and Gallery exhibitions and publications, explore new ways of thinking about decorative arts, design history, and material culture. A member of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH), Bard Graduate Center is an academic unit of Bard College.

Table of Contents

3 Director’s Welcome

5 Teaching

23 Research

39 Exhibitions

51 Donors and Special Events

Two-piece dress made for Madame Hadenge on the occasion of her honeymoon. France, 1881. Cotton Vichy fabric, bodice lined in white cotton. Les Arts Décoratifs, collection Union française des arts du costume, Gift Madame L. Jomier, 1958, UF 58-25-1 AB. Photographer: Jean Tholance.

2 Director's Welcome

Director’s Welcome

This is the fifth edition of Bard Graduate Center’s Year in Review. In looking at previous issues, it is remarkable to note how far we have travelled —and flourished—in four years. 2010-11 was notable for be-ing the first year of our now well-established Focus Gallery project. In 2011-12, we received major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation. 2012-13 saw the launch of our Andrew W. Mellon “Cultures of Conservation” initiative; and in 2013-14, our twentieth anniversary, we published the landmark survey book, History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000. All along, the Gallery continued to garner acclaim with exhibitions as diverse as Cloisonné and Knoll Textiles (2010-11); Hats (2011-12); Circus and the City and Georges Hoentschel (2012-13); and William Kent and Waterweavers (2013-14).

This year—from our collaboration with the Chipstone Foundation, the topics of our students' Qualifying Papers and dissertations, the re-search interests of the faculty, the depth of our academic courses, the scope of our seminar series, to the range of our exhibitions and public programming—we continued to chart new territory. In the Main Gal-lery, we presented Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life and the hugely popular Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette. The fall and spring Focus Gallery projects were both notable: Visualizing 19th-Cen-tury New York produced our first digital publication while The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing emphasized that technology and the digital world are part of the world of material culture.

However, what never changes at Bard Graduate Center is our com-mitment to learning. In the classroom and in the Gallery, this is what defines us. As we learn, we grow, and we change. I hope you will enjoy reading about our recent activities and achievements. Do not hesitate to visit our website, bgc.bard.edu, to deepen your familiarity with our programs. And remember—the year ahead promises to be as growth-filled and accomplished as the last.

Susan WeberFounder and Director

Director's Welcome 3Photo: Russ Livanov

4 Director's Welcome

Teaching 5

Teaching

Bard Graduate Center’s degree programs thrived in 2014–15, with a record twenty-six arriving MA students and four PhDs, including three MA graduates. We inaugurated a new collaboration with the Chip-stone Foundation with a seminar on “Curatorial Practice as Experi-ment,” culminating in a student-curated exhibition—“Behind the Glass” —that opened in April. Joyce Denney led our 2014–15 Doctoral Prize Seminar on the textiles of China and Japan, and Ivan Gaskell led a seminar in which students helped prepare the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture.

Fourteen new seminars investigated topics ranging from excavations at China’s Tang-period Famen Temple to the impact of the car and car travel in the USA and the designs of Charles and Ray Eames. Focus Project courses investigated a tenth-century Chinese dictionary of ritual objects, interactions between indigenous populations and set-tlers in Oceania, and Fluxus art. A record seven team-taught courses tackled subjects ranging from world furniture (Weber and Leben) to Renaissance artists and craftsmen (Krohn and Morrall) to the links between antiquarians and modern design thinking (Miller, with Stan-ford professor Michael Shanks). For the first time, we offered two Bard Travel Programs: Deborah Krohn accompanied fourteen students to London, where they worked closely with the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and François Louis accompanied nine students to Paris for a seminar on materials and museology organized by the École du Louvre.

Bard Graduate Center graduates secured plum positions: Donna Bilak (PhD 2014) began a postdoctoral fellowship in the history of science at Columbia, and four MA graduates are joining prestigious doctoral programs: Cabelle Ahn (Harvard, art history), Robert Gordon-Fogel-son (USC, art history), Erica Lome (University of Delaware, American civilization), and Sarah Pickman (Yale, history of science and medi-cine). Abigail Balbale, who previously held the Center’s Islamic post-doctoral fellowship, will join the faculty next fall as assistant professor of Islamic art and material culture; and Freyja Hartzell, who earned her MA here in 2005 before completing her PhD at Yale, will be as-sistant professor of modern and contemporary design history. We are sad to mark the retirement of Pat Kirkham, who joined the faculty in 1996 and has helped to make the Center the success it is.

Jeffrey CollinsProfessor and Chair of Academic Programs

Photo: Michael Nagle.

Degrees Granted, May 2015

Doctor of PhilosophyDebra Schmidt Bach, Brooklyn, New York Makers, Masters, and Manufacturers: Early Industrialization of the Silver Trade in Antebellum New York

Master of PhilosophyWilliam Michael DeGregorio, Danbury, ConnecticutObjectifying Dress: Collecting Historic Costume in the United States, 1920–1960

Joyce A. Denney, New York, New YorkThe Story of Troy Finds a Home in Macau: A Set of Intercultural Embroidered Hangings of the Seventeenth Century

Mei Mei Rado, Fuzhou, ChinaXiyang Textiles in the Eighteenth-Century Qing Imperial Court: Fabrication, Display, and Representation of the West

Master of Arts Lisa M. Adang, New York, New York At the Nexus of a Nebula: Where Phenomenology and Material History Meet in Virtual Reality

Jaeun Cabelle Ahn, Richmond, Canada Skinned Sculptures: Paper, Plaster, and Pose in Jean-Galbert Salvage’s Anato-mie du Gladiateur combattant (1812)

Emily Anne Banas, Brunswick, Maine Art or Culture? Interpretation and Display of Islamic Objects in the Museum

Virginia Fister, St. Louis, Missouri From the Studio to the Salon: Artists, Craftsmen, and Collaborative Environ-ments in Eighteenth-Century France

Andrew Edward Gardner, Diablo, California From Suburban Kitchen to Pop Art Canvas: Women and American Domesticity in Tom Wesselmann’s Still Life #30, 1950–1963

Robert Jacob Gordon-Fogelson, Providence, Rhode IslandSunar, Graves, and the Heyday of the Furniture Showroom, 1979–1983: Building a Link between Producers and Purchasers of Corporate Design

Linden J. Hill, Highland Park, Illinois“Mod”-ifying the Medieval: Yves Saint Laurent and Roland Petit’s Notre Dame de Paris

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Linnea Perrin Johnson, Kansas City, MissouriEasy Care for Durable Beauty: The Formica Pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair

Annabel Frassinelli Keenan, Easton, ConnecticutSwid Powell: A Case Study in Celebrity Product Design with Special Reference to Richard Meier

Jane Therese Killmar, Memphis, TennesseeAvant-Garde Feminism: The Fashion Images and Shows of Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garçons, 1975–1990

Erica Lome, South Egremont, Massachusetts“A Place of Demonstration”: Israel Sack’s “King” Hooper Mansion and the Busi-ness of American Antiques in the 1920s Colonial Revival

Jaimie Nicole Luria, Miami, FloridaDiné 'Iikááh: Mediating Materiality and Meaning of Navajo Medicinal Practice

Claire Elizabeth McRee, Lancaster, PennsylvaniaThe Debutante Slouch: Fashion and the Female Body in the United States, 1912–1925

Julia Pastor, Kenosha, WisconsinFrom E-tail to Retail: Warby Parker’s Visionary Quest for Cool

Sarah Mendoza Pickman, White Plains, New York“Not a Trouser Button Must Be Missing”: Dress, Image, and Cultural Encounter in the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration

Kirstin Purtich, Santa Monica, CaliforniaThe Gentleman and the Bachelor: Fashioning the Male Consumer in 1920s Paris and Berlin

Ariel Rosenblum, Worcester, MassachusettsTekhelet: The Biblical Colorant and Its Contemporary Revival

Minda Bond Stockdale, Albuquerque, New MexicoThe Companionate Marriage: Tracing an Iconographic Theme on English Em-broidered Furnishings under the Restoration

Beatrice Victoria Thornton, San Francisco, CaliforniaAn Abstract Documentarian: Photography as Design Process in Jan Yoors Tapes-tries, 1956–1977

Lanzhen Wang, Shenyang, ChinaExtravagance Refurnished: Interior Display in the Jin Ping Mei Illustrations of the Early Qing Era, 1650–1750

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Dissertation Writing Awards/Prizes/ Assistantships/Fellows

Final Year AwardMei-Ling Israel

Research AwardJoyce DenneyMei Rado

Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts Dissertation Writing Award Erin Eisenbarth

CINOA Dissertation Award Debra Schmidt Bach

Clive Wainwright AwardSarah Pickman

Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts AwardRobert Gordon-FogelsonClaire McRee

Teaching Assistantships Christine GriffithsMeredith Nelson-Berry

Bard Hall Resident AssistantChristine Griffiths

Curatorial FellowsMartina D’Amato Robert Gordon-FogelsonLara Schilling

Editorial FellowChristine Griffiths

Research FellowAntonia Behan

Digital Media Lab FellowAndrew Gardner

John Bachmann. New York and Environs, 1859. Lithograph. Courtesy of the New York Historical Society.Following page Photo: Alex Weiss Hills

8 Teaching

Teaching 9

Fall 2014 Courses

500 Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture

Deborah Krohn502 Approaches to the Object Ivan Gaskell, Catherine Whalen526 Arts of China (Decorative Arts of Later Imperial China, 1000–1900)

François Louis530 English and American Ceramics Kenneth Ames565 Twentieth-Century Fashion Michele Majer567 Art and Material Culture of the Tang Period, 618–907: Famen Temple

François Louis601 Western Furniture: From Antiquity to 1830 Ulrich Leben,

Susan Weber

693 Craft and Design in the USA, 1945 to the Present Catherine Whalen730 The Social Lives of Things: The Anthropology of Art and Material Culture

Aaron Glass778 Islamic Art and Material Culture from Early Islam to the Ottoman Period

Rachel Parikh801 Other Europes: Design and Architecture in Central Europe, 1880–1956

Paul Stirton863 Objects of Colonial Encounter Aaron Glass, David Jaffee 872 Design and Interior Architecture in Germany, 1700–2000

Ulrich Leben895 Cultures of Conservation: From Objects to Subjects—On Sites, Rites, and

Paradigms Hanna Hölling903 In Focus: The Interface Experience Design Tutorial Kimon Keramidas904 The Art of French Eighteenth-Century Gilt Bronze Charlotte Vignon905 Commerce and Culture in the Modern City David Jaffee906 Vernacular New York: Architecture / Landscapes / Tradition

Gabrielle Berlinger907 Textiles of China and Japan: Highlights from the Ancient World to the

Early Twentieth Century Joyce Denney908 Artists, Craftsmen, and the Pursuit of Nature in Renaissance Europe

Deborah Krohn, Andrew Morrall909 On the Road in the USA Kenneth Ames910 The Antiquarian Foundations of Contemporary Design Thinking Peter Miller, Michael Shanks (Classics, Stanford University) 911 From Ditch to Nitch: Making the Vatican Museum Jeffrey Collins

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Spring 2015 Courses

501 Survey of the Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture II François Louis

544 The Rediscovery of Antiquity Elizabeth Simpson564 In Focus: Design and Ritual in Imperial China—A Case Study

François Louis613 Ancient Jewelry and Metalwork Elizabeth Simpson655 Markets to Manners: Cooking and Eating in Early Modern Europe

Deborah Krohn732 Design Reform in Britain: From Pugin to Mackintosh Paul Stirton754 Film and Design in Hollywood Pat Kirkham795 Exhibiting Culture/s: Anthropology In and Of the Museum

Aaron Glass799 Domestic Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century America

Kenneth Ames835 Charles and Ray Eames: Design, Architecture, Exhibitions, Films, and

Multimedia Presentations, ca 1940–1978 Pat Kirkham844 Interpretation of the Artifact in the Age of New Media

David Jaffee, Kimon Keramidas878 French Furniture—Paris, 1650–1830 Ulrich Leben877 Picturing Things: Photography as Material Culture

Aaron Glass, Catherine Whalen912 Curatorial Practice as Experiment: A Chipstone Foundation-

Bard Graduate Center Collaboration Catherine Whalen913 The Arts of Design in France, 1780–1815: Interiors, Objects, and Fashion between the Revolution and the First Empire

Ulrich Leben, Michele Majer914 In Focus: Frontier Shores—Ethnography, Colonialism, and Oceania from

the Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century Shawn Rowlands

915 History and Material Culture: New Directions Ivan Gaskell916 History, Culture, and Material Culture of Wine, 1700–2000

Kenneth Ames917 In Focus: Revisions—Art, Materiality, and Continuity in Fluxus (1960s–

1970s) Hanna Hölling918 Material Culture and Social Life in the Early Modern Home, 1500–1700

Andrew Morrall

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Faculty Year in Review

Kenneth L. AmesSomething old, something new. In the category of old, my final bit of scribbling about folk art, written for the catalog of a forthcoming exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. Also, wonder of wonders, yet another (admittedly modest) royalty check for Death in the Dining Room. Who knew? In the category of new were two first-time courses, one on car culture and automobility in the U.S., the other on the history and material culture of wine. The first proved a rich topic, involving far more than we could possibly explore in a semester. The second proved just the opposite. It turns out that wine’s many attractions are more sensory than intellectual. The culture of wine is steeped in mystification, but, in the end, wine is but fermented grape juice. Otherwise, a few posts on the West 86th website, occasional manuscript reviews, and e-mail contacts with old friends and former students. And always, attentiveness to the conflicts and complexities that continue to afflict this messy world in which we live.

Gabrielle BerlingerIn this last year as postdoctoral fellow in the “Cultures of Conserva-tion” initiative, I have enjoyed a range of scholarly activities. I began by sharing research on the Tenement Museum’s preservation efforts at a heritage conference in Portugal and later expanded the discussion at the American Folklore Society meeting and the fifth Forum on China–US Folklore and Intangible Cultural Heritage. Concurrently pursuing

research on contemporary Jewish ritual, I presented fieldwork on Sukkot observance at the Harry Friedman Society and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. I also had the privilege of teaching a new semi-nar—Vernacular New York: Architec-ture / Landscapes / Tradition—that examined the city’s natural and built environments as expressions of cultural value, social history, and heritage production. I joined the board of the New York Folklore Society and am collaborating on an oral history project with Domestic Workers United. I am sad to leave the community, but I hope to stay connected from Chapel Hill, where I will begin as assistant professor and Tanenbaum Fellow in UNC’s Depart-ment of American Studies next fall.

Jeffrey CollinsHaving often admired colleagues who successfully combined teaching and research, I experimented in the fall with a new course—From Ditch to Nitch—that studied the early modern afterlife of antique sculpture in connection with my ongoing project on the intersec-tions of archeology, antiquarian scholarship, and museum display in eighteenth-century Rome. Ancients and moderns remained a focus in November, when I lectured at the Bruce Museum on the Italianate furniture designs of William Kent, and in December, when I was invited to give a keynote address at the fifteenth David Nichol Smith Confer-ence on Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sydney. January found me studying

12 Teaching

sixteenth-century Augustinian monasteries at Ixmiquilpan and Actopan (Hidalgo), and in February I was invited back to Mexico to lecture at the Museo Franz Mayer and consult on the reinstallation of their permanent galleries. In March I returned to the trenches with a talk on the Italian entrepreneur/excavator Domenico de Angelis in the panel “Digging Italy” at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies held in Los Angeles.

Ivan GaskellIn addition to supervising this year’s two Focus Gallery exhibitions, I taught Approaches to the Object (fall, with Catherine Whalen) and His-tory and Material Culture: New Di-rections (spring). I spent the summer as a senior fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg (Advanced Study Institute), Georg-August University, Göttingen, where I returned in December 2014 and May 2015 and joined its interna-tional advisory board. In December, I lectured at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. In March, I served on the vetting committee of the European Fine Art Fair, Maastricht. I organized the symposium Revitalizing University Museums at Bard Graduate Center in April and was appointed to the College Art Association’s Museum Committee. In May and June, I spoke at symposia in Glasgow, Göttingen, and Oxford. Besides book reviews in West 86th and The Philosophical Quarterly, I published “Being True to Rubens,” in Art, Music, and Spectacle in the Age of Rubens (Brepols, 2014), and with co-authors Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Sara J. Schechner, and Sarah Anne Carter, Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Aaron GlassLast year was the centennial of Edward S. Curtis’s landmark 1914 silent film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, which I participated in restoring. I introduced and discussed the film in theaters or at academic conferences in Portland, Oregon; Santa Fe; Washington, D.C.; Seattle; Vancouver; Montreal; and New York. I also helped produce a number of bo-nus features—including a 40-minute documentary—that accompany the film on DVD (distributed by Milestone Films). I delivered invited lectures at Columbia University, Concordia University, and the American Museum of Natural History. My essay, “Indigenous Ontologies, Digital Futures,” was published in Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledges (Routledge), and a 2004 essay, “‘The Thin Edge of the Wedge’: Dancing around the Potlatch Ban, 1922–1951,” was anthologized in the forthcoming Reading Cultural Anthropology (Oxford). My long-term collaborative project on Franz Boas was awarded a three-year grant from the NEH Scholarly Editions and Translations Program. Activities included a full course load of teach-ing and service on the Cultures of Conservation planning committee.

Hanna HöllingChangeable artworks, their nature and behavior, were at the center of my research this year. In particular, I concentrated on the ongoing life of Fluxus objects, ephemera, and performance in preparation for my upcoming Focus Gallery exhibition Revisions—Zen for Film (September 2015–January 2016). My preparatory course Revisions: Art, Materiality, and Continuity in Fluxus (1960 –1970s) (spring 2015) exposed students to the theoreti-

Teaching 13

cal and historical aspects of Fluxus materiality while involving them in curatorial decisions and the design of the exhibition’s digital component. I spent much of this year writing and editing two books: Against Gravity (under contract with the University of California Press), which grows from my doctoral thesis and con-cerns the multiplicity of existence of multimedia installations; and Revisions, the catalogue accompany-ing the exhibition. I again taught Cul-tures of Conservation in the fall and gave several presentations, includ-ing a keynote lecture in the confer-ence Authenticity in Transition at Glasgow University (December 2014) and a presentation in the opening session of the Annual Conference of American Institute for Conservation in Miami (May 2015).

David JaffeeI was busy during 2014–15 with my exhibit Visualizing 19th-Century New York, which opened this fall in the Focus Gallery. Completing work begun last year, my students and I produced the Center’s first all-digital Focus Gallery publica-tion (www.visualizingnyc.org), using a wonderful 1852 map by Mathew Dripps as the interface through which to locate the objects and essays. Inspired by my teaching, the exhibition and my own ongoing research examines a new middle-class visual and material culture, centered around the domestic parlor and diffused in the form of the litho-graphs, stereoviews, and illustrated newspapers produced by New York City’s cultural entrepreneurs. I will explore this question further in a future Focus Gallery project examin-ing how those objects were exhib-ited at venues such as the 1853 New York Crystal Palace. Finally, in the

wake of our extremely successful 2011 and 2013 institutes, in July 2015 the Center will again host an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers, devoted to “American Material Culture: 19th-Century New York.”

Kimon KeramidasThe past year has been full of activ-ity for me personally and in the Digi-tal Media Lab. April saw the opening of my Focus Gallery exhibition The Interface Experience: 40 Years of Per-sonal Computing, which investigates the development of home computers and the changing (and very personal) roles these devices play in our lives. Five years in development, the exhibition features working devices visitors are encouraged to use, as well as a tactile display of landmarks in interface design; it is supported by a comprehensive web application and a book designed like a 1980s us-er’s guide. Along the way I presented this work at the annual gatherings of the Society for the History of Tech-nology, Museum Computer Network, and Museums and the Web. In Feb-ruary, I gave a paper at the College Art Association’s annual gathering on changing notions of publication in the digital age. I also began work on a collaborative project between the Center and the Smithsonian’s Fre-er and Sackler Galleries to develop a digital exhibition about the Sogdian culture of Central Asia. 

Pat KirkhamIn spring 2015, I taught two class-es, on Charles and Ray Eames 1941–1978 and Design and Film in Hollywood, topics I will join in my new book project, Charles and Ray Eames: The Hollywood Connection. In November 2014, I lectured at Kings-ton University, UK, about recently

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catalogued Eames documents now available at the Library of Congress, and in February I gave papers at a symposium organized by the Americas Society on “Modern Design in Latin America,” and in Paul Stirton’s panel on “The Global Histo-ry of Design and Material Culture” at the College Art Association confer-ence, focusing on the Bard Graduate Center/Yale History of Design. In May 2015, I spoke on “Eva Zeisel’s Vienna, Budapest, New York: Wanderlust, Imprisonment, Exile and Emigration” at the Papanek Symposium on Émigré Design Culture: Histories of the Social in Design and, with my colleague Catherine Whalen, on “Teaching Histories of Design in the United States from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to Today, and Beyond” at The Domain of Design History—Looking Back, Looking Forward conference at the Open University, UK.

Deborah L. KrohnMy return to teaching after a sab-batical year, with the new role of Director of Masters Studies, saw the completion of my book manuscript, Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens, now in production with Ashgate and scheduled to appear later in 2015. I traveled to Berlin twice—in September to give a talk at a conference called “Reading How-To” at the Max Planck Institute, and in March for the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meet-ing, where I organized two sessions and gave a talk. In early January I was in Paris, where I spoke at the INHA (Institut national de l’histoire de l’art), and in May I spoke at a conference in Cambridge, England, organized in conjunction with the exhibition Treasured Possessions

from the Renaissance to the Enlight-enment at the Fitzwilliam Museum. The year ended with ten days in London with members of our first-year MA class, visiting museums and historic houses and exchanging ideas with students at the Royal College of Art’s postgraduate pro-gram in the history of design.

Ulrich LebenDuring 2014–15, I taught two classes on German and French furniture and design, supplemented by several field trips to study the material first hand. I also worked with the French Heritage Society to arrange internships in French museums for Bard Graduate Center students. The monograph on Palais Beauharnais, to which I contributed, will appear with Flammarion in 2016. Since fall 2014 I have collaborated with col-leagues in Paris on the reweaving of fabrics for the Salon of the Four Seasons, a project featured in my class with Michele Majer on design in France between 1785 and 1815. In summer 2014, I participated in a symposium on Leo von Klenze, ar-chitect of the king of Bavaria. I pub-lished further research on Georges Hoentschel in the journal of the Furniture History Society and on the furnishings of the Smoking Room at Waddesdon Manor in the Journal of the History of Collections—my first e-publication. In collaboration with Waddesdon and the Wallace Collec-tion, I am curating an exhibition on furniture by the French cabinetmak-er Riesener, scheduled for 2016.

François LouisChinese material culture of the ninth to the eleventh centuries remained central to my work this year. A final burst of editorial work last fall re-sulted in the publication of a volume

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on the Liao dynasty (907–1125), entitled Perspectives on the Liao, which I co-edited with Valerie Hansen and Daniel Kane. The volume is the fruit of a 2010 Bard Graduate Center /Yale interdisciplin-ary conference and contains ten articles that present this dynasty in a new light, focusing specifically on its indigenous Kitan culture and lan-guage, as well as on its global con-nections. My contributions include an article that reexamines imperial Kitan ancestral worship and a pecu-liar funerary custom that employed metal face masks and wire mesh body wrappings. With students I explored the period through two new courses: a seminar on one of China’s great archaeological discov-eries, the Famen Temple Buddha relic deposit buried in 874; and the first of two courses in preparation for a Focus Gallery exhibition. At the core of the exhibition will be a long-forgotten tenth-century illustrated dictionary of classical ritual objects.

Michele MajerThis year I co-taught a new class with my colleague Ulrich Leben on The Arts of Design, 1780–1815: Interiors, Objects, and Fashion between the French Revolution and the First Empire. This was a richly rewarding and decidedly enjoyable collaboration for us and, we trust, for the students. In February I was invited to speak at the Providence Athenaeum, where I presented a talk based on my 2009 article “La Mode à la Girafe: Fashion, Culture, and Politics in Bourbon Restoration France.” In March I reprised my 2012 conference paper, “Esther Williams and the Swimming Pool as Spectacle,” for the Cooper-Hewitt’s Master’s Program. My article “Plus

que Reine: Napoleonic Cost-ume at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin” will be pub-lished shortly as an e-book by Interdisciplinary.net as part of the proceedings of a 2013 conference. In preparation for a conference in the United Kingdom in July, I am researching L’Hôtel des Modes, an eighteenth-century townhouse in Paris that served as a venue for exhibiting fashion and paintings in the early twentieth century.

Peter N. MillerMy fall was spent responding to copyeditors’ queries and my winter reading page proofs. In the spring, the French translation of Peiresc’s Europe was published by Albin Michel, and Peiresc’s Mediterranean World by Harvard. I began working on Peiresc in the spring of 1993, so these publications bring to a close a long cycle of scholarship. In October, I represented Bard Graduate Center at a conference sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on connecting graduate training in art history with museum work and lectured to the Global Forum of the National Library of Israel on the history of national libraries. In November, I was the Center’s delegate to a meeting of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History at the Clark Institute. In December, I gave the keynote address at the annual Barnard Medieval-Renaissance conference. In January, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, I chaired a session on research institutes in the humanities. In March, at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, I chaired a panel discussion on antiquarianism.

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Andrew MorrallActivities this year have included publication of an article, “Jonas Sil-ber’s Universe Cup and its Sources” (in Jeffrey Chipps Smith, ed., Visual Acuity and the Arts in Early Modern Germany, Ashgate), and several talks and conferences. These included keynote lectures at a conference in Warsaw on The Agency of Things: New Perspectives on European Art 1300–1600 and at the conference Artistes à la ville et artistes à la cour, at INHA, Centre André Chastel, Paris; a lecture on the Kunstkabinett at Temple University; a talk on Protestant family portraits at the AHA conference in January; and a talk at the conference Cultural Production in Early Modern England held at Birmingham University’s Shakespeare Institute. I also participated in workshops on Renaissance Colour Practices, at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin, and on “The Paston Treasure,” organized in Norwich, England, by the Paul Mel-lon Centre for Studies in British Art. I co-organized and chaired three sessions on “The Extended Narrative of the Object” at the annual confer-ence of the Renaissance Society of America in Berlin.

Shawn RowlandsAt the end of July 2014, I finished cataloguing the Australian Aboriginal collection held at the Peabody Mu-seum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. This included hundreds of photographs, 1,100 objects, and associated archives. The project is ongoing, and besides contributing my research to two major Harvard exhibitions, I have submitted or am about to submit numerous publica-tions based on this work to journals. I have presented my research at multiple conferences this academic

year, including the Stickley Museum Emerging Scholars Symposium in October 2014 and the Horniman Museum and Gardens conference on Weapons and Anthropology in February 2015. Since arriving at Bard Graduate Center in August 2014, I have been researching and writing for my upcoming Focus Gal-lery exhibition, entitled Entangled Frontiers and scheduled to open in 2016. This has involved research at several major American museums, the examination of numerous objects and archives, and liaising with indig-enous groups. As part of this project, I have taught the first of two In Focus courses entitled Frontier Shores.

Elizabeth SimpsonMy research on the wooden arti-facts from the royal Phrygian tombs at Gordion, Turkey, has continued—making summer 2014 my thirty-fourth year of fieldwork in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara. The museum reopened in 2014 with new displays throughout, including new cases for the artifacts from Gordion. The 2014 summer season was dedicated to final research and photography for The Gordion Wooden Objects, Volume 2: The Furniture and Wooden Artifacts from Tumulus P, Tumulus W, and the City Mound (Leiden and Boston: Brill, forthcoming). Also in progress is The Adventure of the Illustrious Scholar: Papers Presented to Oscar White Mus-carella, of which I am editor. My new drawings of the parasol from Tu-mulus P at Gordion appeared in my article for the Engin Özgen Festschrift, Armizzi: Engin Özgen’e Armagan (Ankara, 2014). In November I gave the James Beck Memorial Lecture for ArtWatch International in New York: “King Midas’s Furniture: A Tale of Archaeological Conservation.”

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Courses taught include seminars on ancient art and culture: Ancient Jewelry & Metalwork and The Redis-covery of Antiquity.

Paul StirtonFor much of this year I have been preoccupied with old research, at-tempting to complete projects that should have been left behind by now. Twelve years ago I was com-missioned to write an essay on the Hungarian art historian Frederick Antal for a book being prepared by the INHA. As the years passed, I assumed this publication had been abandoned; but it was suddenly revived last year. Unable to find my original text, I have been revising an earlier draft that was translated into French. There is a lesson here I am sure we can all recognize. I have also been translating and editing articles by the nineteenth-century French critic Pedro Rioux de Maillou on “The Decorative Arts and the Machine,” which will appear in West 86th. This has kept me away from my main research project on the political and social meanings of the Neo-Baroque in post-World War I Central Europe, on which I gave a paper at the 2014 Annual Design History Society Conference in Oxford, devoted to “Design for War and Peace.”

Susan WeberOne of the highlights of this past academic year has been returning to my teaching roots at Bard Graduate Center after more than ten years. This fall, along with Dr. Ulrich Leben, I had the pleasure to present the history of Western furniture from antiquity to 1830 to our students. In addition to teaching, I focused my work on three upcoming exhibi-tions: Swedish Wooden Toys (opening

in fall 2015), John Lockwood Kipling (fall 2017), and Boucheron Jewelry (fall 2018). Co-curator Amy Ogata and I finalized exhibition labels and design work for the Swedish Wooden Toys exhibition. We were greatly honored that the exhibition cata-logue was awarded the 2015 award for distinguished publication by the Association of Art Museum Cura-tors. Now that research on John Lockwood Kipling has reached its final stage, with manuscripts due in the summer of 2015, my research and writing will shift to Boucheron, the French jewelry dynasty. My co-curator Christophe Guy and I are thrilled to be able to showcase some of the firm’s gems in our gal-leries in 2018.

Ittai WeinrybThis year I was a fellow at the Forum for Trans-regional Studies in Berlin, where I have completed my first book, entitled The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages: Sculpture, Material, Making, which will appear in Decem-ber 2015 with Cambridge University Press. The book focuses on the var-ied aspects of bronze making, from mining, smelting, and alloy-making through the various techniques of lost-wax casting. The study focuses both on large-scale objects made in bronze, such as doors and basins, as well as self-moving devices, such as automata, water-clocks, and fountains. This year also marks the completion of an edited volume on votive objects, or ex-votos, which are made and given by devotees either as a means of soliciting as-sistance from a deity or as a token of gratitude. The volume will appear in the Bard Graduate Center mono-graph series Cultural Histories of the Material World in September 2015. I am currently developing a new

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project that focuses on astrolabes and on the practice of the scientific object within the broader context of material culture in medieval Europe.

Catherine WhalenIn addition to completing my book Material Politics: Francis P. Garvan, American Antiques, and the Alchemy of Collecting in the Interwar United States for University of Massachu-setts Press, I presented on material culture studies methodology and pedagogy at six conferences and symposia, with the aim of promoting material culture scholarship across multiple fields. These included the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the College Art Association, and the American Studies Association, along with symposia at the Smithsonian’s

Renwick Gallery, the North Eastern Public Humanities Consortium at Yale, and the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. With the American Studies Association’s Ma-terial Culture Caucus, I co-authored “Twenty Questions to Ask an Object,” an object-based exercise for use in classrooms and museums, avail-able at theasa.net/caucus_material. As part of Bard Graduate Center’s new partnership with the Chipstone Foundation, a Milwaukee-based institution dedicated to the study of American material culture and decorative arts, I developed and taught a new course, Curatorial Practice as Experiment, in which students curated an exhibition with objects from Chipstone and the Bard Graduate Center Study Collection.

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Barbara Nessim. Beware of the Blue Sky Syndrome, 1967. Pen and ink, watercolor, collage. Courtesy of the artist.

Admissions, Internships, and Career Development

Incoming Students, Fall 2015

After a very successful recruitment season, which included four open houses and trips to more than twenty-five graduate school fairs and information sessions all over the country. The admissions cycle ended with Accepted Students Day on March 18, 2015. Students attended classes, had lunch with faculty, staff, and current students; went to workshops and a faculty roundtable on the Center’s Gallery exhibi-tions; and had a coffee hour with faculty and current students. This culminated in an entering class for fall 2015 that will include three new PhD students and eighteen new MA students. Work begins with new student orientation on August 24, 2015. We are delighted to wel-come the following students to our community:

Entering PhD CohortJulie Bellemare, McGill University; MA, Oxford UniversitySarah Scaturro, Colorado College; MA, Fashion Institute of TechnologyXiaoyi Yang, Minzu University of China; MA, Columbia University

Entering MA CohortPersephone Allen, University of EdinburghAlexandra Beuscher, Connecticut CollegeAnne Carlisle, Iowa State UniversityMichael Dewberry, Trinity CollegeAna Matisse Donefer-Hickie, University of King’s CollegeEmily Field, Michigan State UniversityMaggie Frick, The College of WoosterAmanda Hinckle, College of William and MaryIrene Jaramillo-Velez, Fashion Institute of TechnologyElizabeth Muir, Illinoise Wesleyan UniversityLeela Outcalt, Reed CollegeMichael Parker, Hampshire CollegeGrace Reff, East Tennessee State UniversityCatherine Dickson Stergar, Davidson CollegeDarienne Turner, Stanford UniversityAlyssa Velazquez, Washington CollegeNadia Westenburg, Fordham University

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Internships, Summer 2014

MA students are required to do an internship for which they receive three credits. In 2014, students worked in the following institutions:

Cabelle Ahn Cooper-Hewitt, National

Design Museum: Department of Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design

Emily Banas The Sterling and Francine

Clark Art InstituteVirginia Fister Musee Carnavalet, ParisAndrew Gardner Cooper-Hewitt, National

Design Museum: Krueger Fellowship Program

Robert Gordon-Fogelson Knoll and Dwell MagazineLinden Hill Metropolitan Museum of

Art—Costume Institute

Susan Hunter Metropolitan Museum of

Art—European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Linnea Johnson Morris-Jumel MansionAnnabel Keenan Victoria and Albert

Museum, LondonJane Killmar Metropolitan Opera

Costume ArchivesErica Lome New-York

Historical SocietyJaimie Luria New York State Council

on the ArtsClaire McRee Bartow-Pell MansionJulia Pastor Whitney Museum,

Education Department

Kirstin Purtich Los Angeles County

Museum of ArtAriel Rosenblum Danish National

Research Foundation, Centre for Textile Research

Mary Sauerwein Metropolitan Museum

of Art, Department of Medieval Art, The Cloisters

Minda Stockdale Park City MuseumBeatrice Thornton The Frick Collection, Art

Reference LibraryLanzhen Wang The Brooklyn Museum,

Asian Art Department

Workshops offered to Students

August 28Faculty Assistant

September 12Watson Library Trip

September 23Image Research

October 1Photoshop

October 15PhD Application

October 17Writing Tutor: Paper-writing Skills

October 20Internship

October 22Powerpoint

October 17Writing Tutor: Proof-reading Skills

October 23PhD Fellowship Application

October 24Writing Tutor

November 5Conference Paper

December 1Zotero, DML

January 20Public Speaking

March 4Qualifying Paper

May 13Museum Grants

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Career Development and Alumni Events

The Career Development Wiki has now been available to current students and alumni for three years. Each month jobs are posted in the areas of academia, museums, historic houses, development and fund-raising, digital arts, auction house galleries, and other opportunities. Informa-tion about grants, internships, and calls for papers for conferences is also posted. Our students and alumni can always avail themselves of a session to improve their CVs and make an appointment for a career-counseling session.

I also meet with second-year students both for an exit interview and to talk about the start of a job search. Students who would like to be in con-tact with an alum in their particular field are given one to three names to contact. This is part of a new alumni mentor network that we are build-ing. The alumni networking masterlog, for those who graduated from 2006 through 2014, became available in June. By late fall, we expect to have extended it to the first graduating class of 1996.

Elena Pinto SimonDean for Academic Administration and Student Affairs

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Photo: Kate DeWitt

Research

If we were to describe Bard Graduate Center as a “think tank,” what would it mean? Rather than think about training students or planning and executing projects, as a “think tank” this is a place of sustained focus and experimentation on the objects that mediate our experi-ence of time’s passage. This “think tank” function emerged clearly this year, the first of our Research Fellowship program. Like all the other members of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History, we committed to a new funded fellowship program. This year we hosted scholars from Vienna (Barbara Karl), Palermo (Ruggero Longo), Thessaloniki (Georgios Boudalis), and Santa Cruz (Amy Lonetree), whose work ranged from Ottoman war booty in Habsburg collections to medieval mosaic tile decoration in the Mediterranean and from late antique book-binding to early twentieth-century photographs of Native Americans. Our new relationship with the Museum of Arts and Design down the street brought its research curator Elissa Auther into the Research Center, offering a new in-house perspective on contem-porary craft.

“Cultures of Conservation,” already in year three, provided a steady diet of serious thinking about the collaboration between humanists and conservators, most notably in the conversations program, and in a revelatory day discussing the problems posed by “extreme conserva-tion.” Outer space, Holocaust death camps, stuffed animals, historic buildings renewed, conservation in public—all of these topics led rapt audiences to new ways of thinking about the place and possibil-ities of conservation.

Perhaps most exciting in all this were the serendipitous interconnec-tions. One week revealed itself as a deep-dive into experiential learning, with Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday talks, each scheduled separately and in vastly different areas of study, enriching our understanding of how and why objects were made as they were hundreds, even thousands, of years ago. Then there were the two close reflections on the material dimension of books. There was the animal mini-series, as well, with talks in successive weeks on the meaningfulness of crocodiles and elephants in their times and places and media.

Peter N. Miller Dean

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Fall 2014–Spring 2015 Research Programs

Indicates this is part of our “Cultures of Conservation” initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please go to bgc.bard.edu/cultures.

Symposia

September 29 Visualizing 19th-Century New York Held upon the occasion of the Focus Gallery exhibition, Visualizing 19th-Century New York, which explored the role of New York and other cities as models for new ways in which an exploding urban scene might be understood in visual terms, this symposium brought together distin-guished scholars incorporating the perspectives of art history, history, and American studies.

November 17 The New York Graphic Design Scene in the 1970s: A Symposium in Association with the Exhibition Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life This symposium examined several aspects of advertising, publishing, and print technology in the 1970s, with a particular focus on the role of illustration in the New York design scene.

March 20 Symposium:Extreme Conservation This one-day symposium addressed the problem of “Extreme Conserva-tion”—both the extremity of the general situation and extremely dif-

ficult but information-rich cases of conservation.

March 27 Symposium: Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette The exhibition Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette presented the many devices and materials that have altered natural body forms from the seventeenth century to today. Convened in conjunc-tion with the exhibition, the symposium featured presentations by experts in the subject area. This exhibition was organized by Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and curated by Dr. Denis Bruna, curator, Fashion and Textile department, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and professor at the École du Louvre.

Fashioning the Body was made possible in part by The Coby

Foundation, The Selz Foundation, Liliane and Norman Peck, Iris Cantor, Fernanda Kellogg and Kirk Henckels, Deborah Miller and William D. Zabel, and other generous donors.

April 6Symposium: Experiencing the InterfaceAs new technologies become an increasingly important part of everyday life they beg new questions for museum presentation and exhibition design. This half-

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day symposium considered these questions in relationship to the Focus Gallery exhibition The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing.

April 7Symposium: Digital Interpretation: Screens and Devices as Didactic MediaThis symposium juxtaposed the work of leaders in museum technology with efforts being made in the Bard Graduate Center’s Focus Gallery Project to pose a variety of different approaches and models that engage with these new developments, and to open up discourse about the best ways to integrate digital technology in the interpretive and didactic missions of educational and cultural heritage institutions.

April 17Symposium: Revitalizing University MuseumsMany new uses of university and college collections involve lowering the barriers that separate them, and the encouragement of connections among them in the light of new, transdiciplinary scholarship. What is to be done? This is a question that several universities and colleges in North America and Europe are addressing in various ways. This symposium examined some recent and emerging developments, and provided a forum for discussing possible future uses of university and college museums.Made possible in part through a grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and financial support from The Antioch Review.

Commodore 64 with 1702 monitor, 1982. Photographer: Bruce White.

Scholars’ Days

September 29 Visualizing New York

November 17 Barbara Nessim

March 27Fashioning the Body

April 6Experiencing the Interface

Seminar Series

September 17Zhao FengDirector, China National Silk Museum, HangzhouSilks from West and East: A Study on the Textiles from TAM170, Astana, Turfan, Xinjiang

October 1Francesca TrivellatoHistory, Yale UniversityMaterial Culture as the Economic History of Demand: Pre-industrial Europe and Global Trade

October 7Roisin InglesbyWord & Image Department, Victoria & Albert MuseumBlending Handwork and Thought: Henry Wilson’s Designs for Silver

*Sponsored by the New York Silver Society

October 8Castle McLaughlinNorth American Ethnography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard UniversityDog Soldiers Don’t Need Picasso: Recovering the Indigenous Materiality of Plains Indian ‘Ledger Art’

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Experiencing the Interface Scholars' Day Gallery Tour Photo: Hue Park

October 14Kathleen CurranArt History, Trinity College, Hartford, CTAtmosphere and Art: Kulturgeschichte, Period Display, and the Invention of the American Museum, 1870-1930

*Sponsored by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts

October 15Graham BealDirector, Detroit Institute of Arts What’s the Big Idea? The Museum, the Collection and the Public

October 21Clare H. CrowstonHistory and French, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignPaying for the Sultan’s Pouf: The Asynchronous Time of Fashion and Credit in 18th-Century France

*Sponsored by the Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture Fund

November 5Amanda WunderHistory, Lehman College; Art History, CUNY Graduate CenterThe Spanish Farthingale: Women, Fashion, and Politics in Baroque Spain

December 3Sandy IsenstadtArt History, University of DelawareTurned on by a Touch: The Light Switch and Everyday Life

January 28Ross ParryMuseum Studies, University of LeicesterThe Postdigital Museum

February 4Shira BrismanArt History, University of Wisconsin-MadisonRelay and Delay: Triumphal Processions in the Era of the Post

February 24Monika KopplinDirector, Museum für Lackkunst, Münster, GermanyVernis Martin: French Lacquer of the 18th Century

*Sponsored by the Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture Fund

February 25Miriam ClavirConservator Emerita and Research Fellow, UBC Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver Jim EnoteExecutive Director, A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage CenterConservation Conversation: Conserving Indigenous Objects and Cultures

March 3Pamela H. SmithSeth Low Professor of History and Director of the Center for Science and Society, Columbia University Andrew LaceyArtist and Independent ScholarConservation Conversation: Knowledge in the Making: Reconstructing Historical Materials and Techniques

March 5Jeremy JohnsProfessor of the Art and Archaeology of the Islamic Mediterranean, Director, Khalili Research Centre for the Art and Material Culture of the Middle East, University of Oxford‘The Magnificent Seven’: The Great Fat.imid Rock Crystal Ewers

*Sponsored by the Trehan Lectures in Islamic Art and Material Culture Fund

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March 17Gretchen Townsend BuggelnArt History and Humanities, Christ College, Valparaiso UniversityArchitecture, Art, and Liturgical Space in Postwar America

*Sponsored by the Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation Fund

March 31Salvador Muñoz ViñasUniversitat Politècnica de València, Departamento de Conservación y Restauración de Bienes Culturales Paul EggertMartin J. Svaglic Endowed Chair in Textual Studies, Department of English, Loyola University, Chicago Conservation Conversation: Conservation and the Future

April 1Dilys BlumJack M. and Annette Y. Friedland Senior Curator of Costume and Textiles, Philadelphia Museum of ArtFrom Industry to Art: Collecting and Exhibiting Textiles at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

April 8Paula FindlenHistory, Stanford UniversityIs a Crocodile a Work of Art? Seeing Objects in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities

April 14Martina DrothAssociate Director of Research and Curator of Sculpture, Yale Center for British ArtElephant in the Room? Majolica in the Context of Sculpture

*Sponsored by the Majolica International Society Fund in Honor of Joan Stacke Graham

April 21Nicholas ThomasProfessor of Historical Anthropology, and Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of CambridgeThe Return of Curiosity: What Museums Are Good for in the Twenty-First Century

April 29Peter BaldwinHistory, University of California, Los AngelesGlobal, Comparative, International, Transnational, and Connected Histories: Is the Methodological Tail Wagging the Historical Dog Again?

May 5Amy OgataArt History, University of Southern CaliforniaThe Metallic in Second Empire France

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Matthew Dripps, drawn by John F. Harrison. Map of the City of New-York Extending Northward to Fiftieth St., 1852. Hand-colored lithograph, published by Matthew Dripps, New York. David Rumsey Map Collection.

*Sponsored by the Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture Fund

May 6Paul TapsellMaori Studies, University of Otago, New Zealand(Post)musings from the Edge: Being an Indigenous Curator in Pacific Paradise

Brown Bag Lunches

September 8Yannick ChastangSpecialist Furniture ConservatorConserving Royal Treasures: Secrets of the Workshop

October 6Barbara KarlTextiles and Carpets, MAK–Öster-reichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst/GegenwartskunstRarity-Booty-Furnishing: Textiles from the Islamic World and Habsburg Collecting (16th to 18th Century)

October 8Steven LeutholdArt History, Northern Michigan UniversityDesign History and the Discourse of Desire

October 13Jordan SandHistory, Georgetown UniversityIntimate Heritage: Recent Trends in Japanese History Museums

October 16Jilly TraganouSpatial Design Studies, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons The New School for DesignThe Olympic Design Milieu

October 27Alexis HagadornHead of Conservation, Columbia University LibrariesUnbinding Conservation: Observations on the Past, Present, and Future of Rare Book Treatment

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Barbara Karl Brown Bag Lunch Photo: Erica Lai

October 28Richard TawsHistory of Art, University College LondonSignal Images: Art and Telegraphy in Post-Revolutionary France

October 29Ronald T. LabacoMarcia Docter Curator, Museum of Arts and DesignOut of Hand at the Museum of Arts and Design: The Inside Story

October 30Tom CubbinRussian and Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield, and School of Design, Royal College of ArtPostmodern Propaganda? Culture, Environment and Memory in Soviet Experimental Design 1973-1984

November 6Anne KraatzIndependent ScholarFashion and Philosophy, or the Influ-ence of a System of Thought on a System of Dress at the End of the 15th Century

November 10Daniel HershenzonLiteratures, Cultures, and Languages, University of ConnecticutRansom in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Exchanging Muslim for Christian Captives

November 19Paula Hohti, Eva Andersson Strand, Luise Ørsted Brandt, and Miguel Ángel Andrés-ToledoThe Danish National Foundation’s Centre

for Textile ResearchFrom Ancient to Modern, Interdisciplin-ary Approaches to Textile Research

December 3Ruggero LongoResearch Assistant, Dipartimento di Scienze dei Beni Culturali, Università della Tuscia, ViterboInterchanges, Workshop Dynamics and Material Matters: The Case of Norman Palermo

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Barbara Nessim. Ode to the Statue of Liberty, 1982–84. Cibachrome photograph of computer screen. Courtesy of the artist.

January 21Christopher MuléFolk Arts Director, Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC)Trouble the Water: Superstorm Sandy and the Preservation of Place

February 23Valerie TaylorSanta Monica and Pasadena City CollegeIsabella d’Este’s Painted Service by Nicola d’Urbino: From Creation to Display

March 2Georgios BoudalisHead of Book Conservation, Museum of Byzantine Culture of Thessaloniki, GreeceThe Making of the Early Codex and the Crafts of Late Antiquity

March 16Lee ProsserHistoric Buildings Curator, Historic Royal PalacesTwo Royal Kitchens: Discovery, Conservation, Interpretation

March 25Andrew S. DolkartProfessor of Historic Preservation, Columbia UniversityHiding in Plain Sight: The 20th-Century Apartment House in New York

April 8Randall McLeodEnglish, University of TorontoThe Birth of Italics

April 28Elissa AutherWindgate Research Curator, Museum of

Arts and Design | Bard Graduate CenterStraddling Worlds: Working Across Art and Craft, and the Museum and the Academy

August 26Amy LonetreeHistory, University of California,

Santa CruzHistoric Photography and the Ho-Chunk Nation: Visualizing the Legacies of Colonialism and Survivance, 1879–1942

Work-in-Progress Seminars

October 14Shawn RowlandsBGC-AMNH Postdoctoral Fellow in Museum AnthropologyStaging Aboriginality

February 26Aaron GlassAssistant Professor, Bard Graduate CenterThe Potlatch Ethic and the Spirit of Cannibalism: Ethnographic Mediation and the Making of a Northwest Coast Icon

Videoconference Series: Technical Art History

The Bard Graduate Center’s Videoconference Series: Technical Art History is part of a new initiative, under the auspices of “Cultures of Conservation,” to connect our educational experience with partner institutions around the globe. The series is presented in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), the Freie Universität Berlin, and the University of Glasgow. The talks take place at the MPIWG in Berlin; however, the audience in New York is able to watch the lectures and join the discussion live by means of a two-way video feed.

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November 17Marta AjmarVictoria and Albert Museum, LondonTechnical Art History: “‘Held up to the light’: Material Mimesis and Cross-Cultural Technologies in Italy, c.1400-c.1600”

December 8Arjan de KoomenUniversiteit van AmsterdamTechnical Art History: “A Farewell to the Humanities?”

December 15Ivan GaskellBard Graduate Center, New YorkTechnical Art History: “Damage”

January 12Georg Josef DietzKupferstichkabinett, SMB, Berlin

“Technical Art History and its Relation to the Conservation of Art on Paper”

January 26Erma HermensUniversity of Glasgow

“Technical Art History and Materials as Markers, a 16th-Century Material Travel Log”

Other events

November 13Roundtable Discussion:

“Design History: Where Are We Now?”Paul Stirton (Bard Graduate Center) led a roundtable discussion on the topic “Design History: Where Are We Now?” with several of the Center’s Research and Visiting Fellows: Steven Leuthold (Northern Michigan University), Richard Taws (University College London), Jilly Traganou (Parsons The New School for Design), and Anne Kraatz (Independent Scholar).

February 10Panel Discussion: The Future of Making and Knowing Published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014 as part of Bard Graduate Center’s ongoing book series, Cultural Histories of the Material World, Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, edited by Pamela H. Smith (Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University), Amy R. W. Meyers (Director of the Yale Center for British Art), and Harold J. Cook (John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown University), was the culmination of a project that began as a five-day conference in London in 2005. On February 10, the editors of the book, together with Glenn Adamson (Director of the Museum of Arts and Design), Edward S. Cooke, Jr. (Charles F. Montgomery Professor, History of American Decorative Arts in the Department of the History of Art at Yale), Martina Droth (Associate Director at the Yale Center for British Art), Florence Grant (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Yale Center for British Art), and Lisa O’Sullivan (Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at the New York Academy of Medicine) explored the future of making and knowing from the varying perspectives of the museum, the classroom, and the research institute.

April 15Alumni SpotlightDonna Bilak, (PhD, Bard Graduate Center, Columbia University, History)The Art of Encryption: Music-Image-Text in Michael Maier’s Alchemical Emblem Book, Atalanta fugiens (1618)

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Installation Workshop

March 23Installation Workshop for Fashioning the Body

Gallery Walkthrough

September 15Main Gallery walkthrough for faculty, staff, and students

September 30Focus Gallery walkthrough for students

December 2MoMa walkthrough for faculty, staff, and students

Other

October 23Lindsey Schneider (ex-Bard Graduate Center staff, now MMA) conducted a grant-writing and application workshop.

April 16Americas Society Exhibition Tour with guest curator Jorge RivasExhibition: Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940-1978

Salons

November 13Digital Media Lab Salon

February 25Digital Media Lab Salon

Installation of Fashioning the Body exhibition Photo: Hollis Barnhart

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Doctoral Forum

September 25 Work in Progress by Elizabeth St. George entitled: Krásná jizba: Modern Design for the Masses in Interwar Czechoslovakia

October 9 Hadley Jensen presented a talk entitled: Visualizing Craft: James Mooney and the Cultures of Collecting and Display in the American Southwest, preparatory to a conference paper.

November 6Sonya Abrego presented her latest research into the marketing of postwar Western-style dress.

December 11 Masako Shinn presented on her work in progress on modern Japanese interior design.

April 6 Amy Bogansky gave an overview of her recent dissertation research into the role of textiles and dyes in the Atlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century and the impact of the trade on the textile industry in Britain.

April 23 Rebecca Sandler Perten presented her current research with a talk entitled The Tobe Pascher Workshop 1956–1988: Reaching Spirituality through Good Design.

May 11Doctoral Progress Symposium

Materials Days

October 19 and 26All-day glass-making workshops for first-year students, held at Urban Glass in Brooklyn, New York

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Urban Glass workshop

Learned Publications

Bard Graduate Center publishes scholarly books and journals includ-ing the series Cultural Histories of the Material World, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, and begin-ning in 2015–2016, the journal SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art. We publish in all fields pertaining to material culture, design history, and the decorative arts.

Published twice annually, West 86th reaffirms Bard Graduate Center’s commitment to expanding the conversation on the content, mean-ing, and significance of objects. West 86th continues to focus on the wider crossroads where scholarship in the decorative arts meets design history and material culture studies. It aims to enlarge the traditional canon to embrace the material culture of all periods and regions while maintaining the highest standards of scholarship. (Published by the University of Chicago Press.)

Published quarterly, SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art will mark its thirty-fifth year of publication and its first as part of Bard Graduate Center publications. SOURCE publishes short articles, limited to 2,500 words and three illustrations per article.

2014–2015 Selected Publications:

The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery (co-published with the University of Chicago Press)Horst Bredekamp, Birgit Schneider, Vera Dünkel, editors

The Interface Experience: A User’s Guide (a Focus Project publication)Kimon Keramidas

The Anthropology of Expeditions: Travel, Visualities, After-LivesErin Hasinoff, Joshua Bell, editors

Forthcoming titles include:

Revisions: Zen for Film (a Focus Project publication)Hanna B. Hölling

Ex Voto: Votive Giving Across CulturesIttai Weinryb, editor

In Space We Read TimeKarl Schlögel

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Digital Media Lab

The Digital Media Lab (DML) fosters the integration of digital media throughout academic programs, gallery exhibitions, and publishing endeavors by providing a well-equipped space for students and faculty to work on projects, a suite of online tools and resources, and collab-orative relationships with institutions doing similar work throughout New York and across the country.

The Focus Gallery provided a strong impetus for work done in the lab, as both the fall and spring shows involved significant digital components. Professor David Jaffee and his students produced a digital publication and two gallery interactives for the fall opening of Visualizing 19th-Century New York, which allowed users to navigate the content created for the project both online and on touchscreens in the gallery.

A second Focus Gallery project, The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing, gave students the opportunity to develop scripts for interactions with five computing devices at the core of the exhibi-tion. In addition, a web application, conceived for this exhibition by students and staff, was created to function as both a free-standing website and gallery accompaniment, providing a dynamic media-rich complement to the objects on view.

For more information about the DML, visit dml.wikis.bgc.bard.edu. The DML is administered by Kimon Keramidas, assistant professor and director of the Digital Media Lab, and David Jaffee, professor and head of new media research.

Kimon KeramidasAssistant Professor and Director of the Digital Media Lab

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Library

The Library began the academic year with the launch of our new custom-built library discovery platform using the open-source soft-ware Blacklight, which gives researchers enhanced access to our book collection. This year, we are continuing to develop this platform to include article results into the search environment and will launch phase two in the fall of 2015. Along with improving digital access to our collections, the Visual Media Resources department has been col-laborating with the Gallery to preserve and digitize early exhibition images, which are now accessible through our online digital image database, Shared Shelf.

We continue to develop our collections both physically and digitally, giving specific focus this year to American Material Culture, Museum Anthropology, and Conservation to support our fellowship programs. As we move into the new year, we will persist in our efforts to enhance access to our library collections while also pursuing our digital preser-vation and archiving goals. Heather TopcikChief Librarian

Photo: Michael Nagle.

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Exhibitions

This past year was enormously exciting for Bard Graduate Center Gallery. We collaborated with the Victoria and Albert Museum on an exhibition devoted to the pioneering artist and illustrator Barbara Nessim who was among the first to use the computer as an artistic tool. We also further enhanced our partnership with the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris with Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette. This is the exhibition that Roberta Smith, in her New York Times review, cited for its “exquisite detail, historical depth and structural clarity.”

Scholarship remained a hallmark of our practice, perhaps best exemplified through Gallery publications. Among the highlights was our first digital publication that professor and head of new media research, David Jaffee, in collaboration with assistant professor and head of the Digital Media Lab, Kimon Keramidas, produced in conjunction with the exhibition Visualizing 19th-Century New York. This groundbreaking Focus Gallery project furthered the Gallery’s role in educating our students who wrote the interpretation and the publication texts. It also revealed our commitment to using new technology to broaden access to our publications. I hope you will visit visualizingnyc.org where the online publication has a permanent home.

Our touring exhibition program continued to expand. Waterweavers: The River in Contemporary Colombian Visual and Material Culture travelled not only to the Centro Conde Duque in Madrid but also to the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, DC, where it received considerable acclaim. In addition, Design Observer selected the book cover, designed by Irma Boom, as one of the fifty best of 2014.

Next year, we will continue our commitment to examining lesser known aspects of the arts of the Nordic world while moving in new programmatic directions, particularly with the Focus Gallery projects. Future exhibitions will bring new institutional partnerships. We are thrilled to be working with two preeminent organizations in France: the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne (Eileen Gray), and the Musées nationaux de France, Château de Fontainebleau (Charles Percier). I like to think of this programmatic diversity as being limitless in time

Exhibitions 39

Whalebone stays. France, ca. 1740-60. Musée des Arts Décoratifs, département Mode et Textile. Articulated pannier with hoops. France, ca. 1770. Musée des Arts décoratifs, dépôt du Musée de Cluny—Musée national du Moyen Âge. Photographer: Patricia Canino.

and without cultural boundaries. The material world that grounds our realm of investigation resonates with numerous possibilities for developing new approaches to curatorial thinking and exhibiting.

I hope you will enjoy the various ways in which we have made our program available to you through the website, and that you will come to know first hand the truly unique experience that the Bard Graduate Center Gallery provides.

Nina Stritzler-LevineDirector, Bard Graduate Center Gallery/Gallery Publications

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Barbara Nessim. Star Girl Banded with Blue Wave, 1966. Silk screen on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

2014–15 Exhibitions

Barbara Nessim: An Artful LifeSeptember 19, 2014–January 11, 2015Barbara Nessim’s distinctive graphics have appeared on the covers of numerous American magazines, including Time, Rolling Stone, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine since the 1960s. In the early 1980s Nessim was one of the first professional illustrators to master the computer as an artistic tool. Her work ranges from provocative drawings (some for men’s magazines) and paintings that represent her underlying feminist views (Gloria Steinem was once her roommate), to advertising campaigns for major corpora-tions (Levi’s and Ralph Lauren were among her clients) and large-scale commissions for public buildings.Curated by Douglas Dodds, Senior Curator, Word and Image Department,

Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Visualizing 19th-Century New YorkSeptember 19, 2014–January 11, 2015Nineteenth-century New York City was a visual experience, a spectacle for residents and visitors alike. This exhibition examined how New York’s cultural entrepreneurs turned to the production of woodcuts, aquatints, lithographs, and photographs in order to make sense of their booming metropolis and to promote their own manu-factures to national and international markets.Curated by David Jaffee, Professor and Head of New Media Research,

Bard Graduate Center, with Bard Graduate Center students.

Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the SilhouetteApril 3–July 26, 2015The extraordinary ways in which women and men have shaped their bodies into distinctive silhouettes in the name of fashion were examined in this exhibition. Having garnered high acclaim at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris in 2013, Fashioning the Body presented the many devices and materials that women and men have used from the seventeenth century to today, including panniers, corsets, crinolines, bustles, stomach belts, girdles, and push-up brassieres, alongside examples of period garments that were molded by these distinctive understructures. It also looked at

Exhibitions 41

how lacing, hinges, straps, springs, and stretch fabrics have been used to alter natural body forms. Organized by Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris, and curated by Dr. Denis Bruna, Curator, Pre-19th Century Fashion and Textile Collections, Musée des Arts décoratifs, and Professor at the École du Louvre.

Made possible in part by The Coby Foundation, The Selz Foundation, Liliane and Norman Peck, Iris Cantor, Fernanda Kellogg and Kirk

Henckels, Deborah Miller and William D. Zabel, and other generous donors. Special thanks to Stephen Jones, Titi Halle, and Antonin Baudry, President, Institut français, Ambassador for French Culture.

The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing April 3–July 19, 2015Computer technology provides us with constant opportunities to try new things, and with each new device we get a peek at what the future has in store. But the history of that technology is just as important as the future. This exhibition presented the story of that past through tactile and interactive displays that stimulated new questions about how we interact with and use computers.Curated by Kimon Keramidas, Assistant Professor and Director of the Digital Media Lab, Bard Graduate Center.

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Installation view, The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing

Fall 2015

Swedish Wooden Toys September 18, 2015–January 17, 2016Swedish Wooden Toys is the first in-depth study of the history of wooden playthings in Sweden from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Remarkable doll houses, puzzles and games, pull toys, trains, planes, automobiles, and more are featured in this colorful exhibition. Although Germany, Japan, and the United States have historically produced and exported the largest numbers of toys worldwide, Sweden has a long and enduring tradition of designing and making wooden toys—from the simplest handmade plaything to more sophisticated forms. This exhibition not only reviews the production of Sweden’s toy industries but also explores the practice of handicraft (slöjd), the educational value of wooden playthings, and the vision of childhood that Swedish reformers have promoted worldwide.Curated by Susan Weber, Founder and Director, Bard Graduate Center, and Amy F.

Ogata, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California.

Revisions —Zen for Film September 18, 2015–January 10, 2016This exhibition focuses on Zen for Film (also known as Fluxfilm no.1), one of the most evocative film works created by the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik in 1962–64. It seeks to uncover some of the inspirations, transitions, remediations, and residues that have occurred in the course of that artwork’s existence. It also examines how firsthand awareness of the materiality of an object enhances visual knowledge. Revisions strives to revise standard notions about an artwork that has undergone a rich history of display and reveals that an artwork is a complex sum of its transitions rather than a static entity with a single interpretation. By putting Zen for Film on display and inviting an interdisciplinary dialogue, this exhibition asks precisely what—and when—the artwork might be.Curated by Hanna Hölling, Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor, Cultures of Conservation, Bard Graduate Center.

Exhibitions 43

Gemla Leksaksfabrik AB. Race car, 1928. Wood. © Roma Capitale—Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali—Collezione di giocattoli antichi, CGA LS 4034. Photographer: Bruce White.

Gallery Publications

Swedish Wooden ToysEdited by Susan Weber, Founder and Director, Bard Graduate Center, and Amy F. Ogata, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California. Published by the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in collaboration with Yale University Press.

A superbly illustrated book, including specially commissioned pho-tography, that looks at over 200 years of Swedish toys, from historic heirlooms to the latest in design and educational value. Special at-tention is given to educational toys and their social value, as well as to individual manufacturing companies with famous names such as BRIO and Gemla.

Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the SilhouetteEdited by Dr. Denis Bruna, Curator, Pre-19th Century Fashion and Textile Collections, Musée des Arts décoratifs, and Professor at the École du Louvre. Published by the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in collaboration with

Yale University Press.

This book, a translation of Les Mecanique des Dessous published by the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris, in 2013, offers fascinating insights into the convoluted transformations employed by both men and women to accommodate the fickle dictates of fashion. With high design, wit, and style, this unique survey tracks the evolution of these sartorial devices—from panniers, crinolines, and push-up bras to chains, zippers, and clasps—concealed beneath outer layers in order to project idealized figures. Women’s corsets constricted waists; exaggerated buttocks and hips counterbalanced jutting bust lines; and chic, aerodynamic silhouettes compressed breasts and flattened bellies. Yet masculine fashion has been no stranger to these tortuous practices. Men flaunted their virility by artificially broadening their shoulders, applying padding to their chests, and slipping codpieces over their groins.

44 Exhibitions

Gallery Touring Exhibitions Fall 2014

Swedish Wooden Toys This exhibition premiered in Paris at the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris June 18, 2014–January 11, 2015 Curated by Susan Weber, Founder and Director, Bard Graduate Center, and Amy F. Ogata, Professor of Art History, University of Southern California.

Spring 2015

Waterweavers: The River in Contemporary Colombian Visual and Material Culture Centro Cultural Conde Duque, MadridFebruary 25–April 12, 2015Art Museum of the Americas | Organization of American States, Washington, DCJune 24–September 27, 2015Curated by José Roca and Alejandro Martin, this exhibition was presented in Madrid in conjunction with the 2015 ArcoMadrid Inter-national Contemporary Art Fair in which Colombia was the featured country. Both presentations were generously supported by the govern-ment of Colombia.

Exhibitions in Progress

Spring 2016

Artek and the Aaltos: Furnishing the WorldFebruary 26–July 31, 2016Curated by Nina Stritzler-Levine, Director, Bard Graduate Center Gallery, and Juhani Pallasmaa, architect, educator, and author.

Entangled FrontiersFebruary 26–July 24, 2016Curated by Shawn Rowlands, Bard Graduate Center-American Museum of Natural History Post-doctoral Fellow in Museum Anthropology.

Exhibitions 45

Education

During the past year, the Education Department served nearly 4,000 people across a wide range of public programs. These included lec-tures, conversations, family days, senior programs, study days, gallery talks, guided tours, and community outreach programs. Broad the-matic ideas that anchored programming were those of craft and place. In our Sketch Night program, a new initiative, professional artists led drawing sessions in the galleries for participants of all ages and skill levels. Education expanded the popular interactive Suitcase Outreach Program by adding Illustrating New York City: From the 19th Century to Today. Bridging both fall exhibitions, this topic allowed students to explore the connection between New York’s past and present through photography, printmaking, and current-day digital technology.

Journalist and activist Gloria Steinem and artist Barbara Nessim touched on friendship, memory, and practice and how it influenced their work before a capacity audience. Artist Camilla Huey, in con-junction with the exhibition, Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette, captivated program participants by creating a pop-up exhibition for the evening by which she facilitated a dynamic discus-sion on form, materiality, and method. In concert, singers Robert Osborne and Minda Larsen performed songs tied to New York City. The ensemble Nouveau Classical Project integrated music and art in unexpected ways. Dressed in costume that embodied the concepts and power drawn from Fashioning the Body the ensemble performed both canonical works and rarely heard modern pieces.

A student exploring detail and form during a workshop

46 Exhibitions

Gallery Programs

September 20 A Walk up Broadway through Lower ManhattanWalking tour with Andrew Dolkart, director of the Historic Preservation Program and professor of historic preservation, Columbia University

October 9Evening for Educators

October 16 Nessim on Nessim

Gallery talk with Barbara Nessim, American artist, illustrator, and educator

October 23The Illustrator’s Cabinet of Wonders: Changing Practices Then and NowPanel discussion moderated by Steven Heller, co-chair of the MFA design program, School of Visual Arts with George Bates, illustrator, part-time professor of illustration, Parsons School of Design; Peter de Sève, American artist who has worked in the illustration and animation fields, and Barbara Nessim, American artist, illustrator, and educator

October 25 On Broadway: Past to Present Walking tour with Matthew A. Postal, architectural historian, New York City tour guide

October 30Panic in the Parlor: Reporting and Reading Pictorial Newspapers in Gilded Age AmericaLecture by Joshua Brown, executive director of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, City University of New York

November 7Nineteenth-Century Prints and Photographs at the New-York Historical SocietyStudy day led by Marilyn Kushner, curator and head, Department of Prints, Photographs and Architectural Collections, at the New-York Historical Society

November 14Sketch NightInstruction by Joan Chiverton, ilustrator

November 18From Analogue to Digital: Documenting the History of Computer-generated Art and DesignLecture by Douglas Dodds, senior curator in the Word and Image department, Victoria and Albert Museum, and curator of Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life

December 4 Gloria Steinem in Conversation with Barbara NessimGloria Steinem, writer, lecturer, editor and feminist activistBarbara Nessim, American artist, illustrator, and educator

December 11Hidden Bemusements of Nineteenth-Century New York: A Curator’s Perspective Gallery talk with David Jaffee, professor and head of new media research, Bard Graduate Center, and curator of Visualizing 19th-Century New York

December 12Sketch NightInstruction by Joan Chiverton, illustrator

Exhibitions 47

December 14Sounds of the Metropolis: Popular songs of 19th-Century New YorkConcert with Robert Osborne, bass-baritone; Minda Larsen, mezzo-soprano, and Seth Weinstein, pianist

April 16Creating the Ideal: Dressing and Installing Costume ExhibitionsLecture and dressing by Tae Smith, costume and textile expert

April 22 Sketch Night Instruction by Joan Chiverton, ilustrator

April 25The Ladies’ MileWalking tour with Matthew A. Postal, architectural historian, New York City tour guide

April 28Evening for Educators

April 29Fashioning the Body: A Curator’s PerspectiveGallery talk with Ann Marguerite Tartsinis, associate curator, Bard Graduate Center Gallery and project coordinator for Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette

April 30Between You and Me: Interfaces as a Door into Another DimensionLecture by Paola Antonelli, senior curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

May 3Sounds and Silhouettes Concert with The Nouveau Classical Project, a fashion-minded musical ensemble

May 7The Art of Corsetry and BindingLecture and demonstration by Camilla Huey, atelier, couturier & artist

May 14 Historical Depictions of Information Technology in Popular CultureLecture and film presentation with Howard Besser, professor, cinema studies, New York University

May 20Sketch Night Instruction by Joan Chiverton, illustrator

May 21Fabricating a Dream: the Dandy’s Silhouette Conversation with Kate Irvin, curator of costume and textiles, Rhode Island School of Design MuseumLaurie Brewer, associate curator of costume and textiles, Rhode Island School of Design Museum

May 30Midtown: Garments and GlamourWalking tour with Matthew A. Postal, architectural historian, New York City tour guide

June 4Striking Poses: Bodies and Objects in 18th-Century French InteriorsLecture by Mimi Hellman, associate professor, art history, Skidmore College

June 9Reading On ScreensPanel discussion moderated by Kate DeWitt, art director, Bard Graduate Center,with Dan Michaelson, founding partner, Linked by Air, and Alexander Proven, editor, Triple Canopy

June 11Stuffed and Stiffened: How X-radiography Reveals the Secrets of Multilayered GarmentsLecture and dressing by Jenny Tiramani, Tony award winning costume and stage designer

48 Exhibitions

June 23The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal ComputingGallery talk with Kimon Keramidas, assistant professor and director of the Digital Media Lab, curator of The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing

June 24Sketch Night Instruction by Joan Chiverton, illustrator

Senior and Family Programs

October 20 and December 8Open House for Seniors

October 18Family Day: Wild with Color! New York Graffiti Arts

May 18 and June 29Open House for Seniors

June 6 Family Day Beyond the Seams: Fashioning Wearable Art

Fall 2014

Gallery ToursStudents & Adults Served: 624

Groups served:American Friends of the Victoria and Albert MuseumAmerican Historical AssociationBaruch College Carter Burden Senior CenterDamsels in DesignThe GataboutsHealth Advocates for Older PeopleHunter CollegeJohn Bard SocietyMS 54

Museum of the City of New YorkNext PageNorth Brooklyn Development Corporation- OST After School Program and Day CampOn ArtParsons The New School for DesignPS46KPratt InstituteProject OreSenior League of Queens ValleyTransition NetworkWarbasse Senior Center

Spring 2015

Gallery ToursStudents & Adults Served: 700

Groups served: Advisory and Education in DesignAssociation of Art Museum CuratorsBard College, Parent Advisory Council Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum Carter Burden Senior CenterCity University of New YorkHealth Advocates for Older PeopleHistoric Royal PalacesKent State UniversityLace Embrace Atelier Inc.Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Fashion CouncilNew York UniversityParsons The New School for DesignUniversity of AlabamaValley Stream Adult EducationConsular Women's ClubSotheby's Institute of ArtYoung Israel Senior CenterWarbasse Senior CenterBard College Alumni AssociationPetite ToursThe Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Exhibitions 49

Suitcase Outreach Program Visits

Fall 2014

Students & Adults Served: 434NYC Public Schools served:PS 306PS 21PS 149PS 156PS 149IS 392

Community Centers and Libraries served:Port Washington LibrarySpuyten Duyvil LibraryWoodside Senior Center

Spring 2015

Students & Adults Served: 300NYC Public Schools served:PS 65PS 150Nest + m

Community Centers served:Woodside Senior CenterRon Wilkins Park, Southern Queens Park Association

Educator-led student gallery tour.

50 Exhibitions

Donors

We deeply appreciate the generosity of the donors who have helped to sustain Bard Graduate Center’s core program of teaching, research, and exhibitions during the past year. Contributions and grants pro-vide vitally needed funds for financial aid to our MA and PhD students, special exhibitions, publications, and a wide range of programs for the academic and general public alike. Thank you!

Endowed Funds

American Members of CINOA AwardSybil Brenner Bernstein ScholarshipBonnie Cashin Fund for Study AbroadMr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation Institute for the Arts of the AmericasPaul and Irene Hollister Lectures on GlassIris FoundationEugenie Prendergast FundFrançoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and CulturePeter Jay Sharp ScholarshipMarilyn M. Simpson ScholarshipTrehan Fund for Islamic Art and Material Culture

Annual Giving

$50,000 and Above Andrea and Eric ColombelAnonymousNational Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute for College and University Teachers Digital Humanities Start-Up Proventus ABGregory SorosWillowbridge Associates/Philip L. Yang, Jr.

Donors and Special Events 51

$10,000-$49,999Frank D. Brown Charitable Trust/

Deborah and Philip D. EnglishCoby FoundationMalka Fund/Mildred WeissmanBarbara Nessim and Jules DemchickNewman's Own FoundationBarbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation Liliane A. and Norman L. Peck PECO FoundationRuddock Foundation for the Arts/

Sir Paul RuddockBernard SchwartzSelz FoundationDeedee and Barrie WigmoreWindgate Charitable Foundation

$1,000-$9,999A G Foundation/Agnes GundJan and Warren AdelsonAkrisAmerican-Scandinavian FoundationAnonymous (2)Antioch ReviewHelen W. and Robert L. BernsteinBarnham BroomIris CantorEdward Lee CaveCowles Charitable TrustDr. Arnold J. DavisVerónica Hernández de ChicoDelco Electrical Corporation

DeLorenzo GalleryHester DiamondBenoist DrutSusan and Tim EttenheimShelly S. FriedmanBernd Goeckler AntiquesIrene HollisterRichard H. JenretteLeon Levy Foundation/Shelby WhitePatricia and Martin LevyLunder Foundation/Paula and

Peter LunderReeva and Ezra P. MagerVera MayerGrace K. and Shepard R. MorganCharlotte Moss and Barry FriedbergRichard NagyLisa Podos and Michael WaisRichard & Alita Rogers Family

Foundation/Sarah Rogers Morris*May and Samuel Rudin Family

FoundationDame Theresa Sackler Elaine B. SargentHarold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable

Trust/Deborah Miller and William D. Zabel

Judy and Michael H. SteinhardtDavid TeigerBarbara and Donald ToberCount Nicholas WenckheimHon. Kimba Wood and Frank E.

Richardson, III

On Thursday, September 18, 2014, Bard Graduate Center hosted the opening reception for Barbara Nessim: An Artful Life. Guests visited the galleries to enjoy the exhibition and mingled over drinks and hors d'oeuvres at the recep-tion. Left: Dr. Susan Weber, Norman and Liliane Peck.

52 Donors and Special Events

ContributorsCaroline and Stephen E. AdlerIrene B. AitkenSara Ansari*Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian and Ago DemirdjianDr. Jacqueline M. Atkins*Mark AvaglianoFrances and Edward L. BarlowYvette and Maurice BendahanCamilla BergeronMeaghan Cain*Joan Canter WeberJay E. CantorLeigh L. CarletonEllen J. Chesler and Matthew J. MallowAmy M. Coes*Dr. Michael ConfortiWilliam J. DaneEnnead ArchitectsAnne. E. Eschapasse*Geraldine Fabrikant MetzColin Fanning*Heidi S. FiskeAndrew J. and Anita G. Frankel Family

Foundation/Elizabeth C. Frankel*Alice C. and George FrelinghuysenAdriana FriedmanG.C. Plumbing & HeatingEmel G. Glicksman and Justin B. Israel Diane GoldsmithCristina GrajalesNancy M. Gray PyneCarol GrossmanGeorge GrunebaumVivian Haime BargMorrison H. HeckscherHirschl & Adler GalleriesKathryn Johnson*Lena and Gilbert E. KaplanMartha B. and George A. KellnerFernanda KelloggRobin and Dr. Thomas D. KerenyiCharlotte H. and Simon P. KooymanTrudy C. KramerDr. Arnold LehmanMelissa C. Lindbeck*Ellen Lupton and Jerry MillerMalcolm MacNeil*Helen Marx

Beatrix and Gregor MedingerPierre G. MirabaudNew York Institute of Technology

Interior Design DepartmentMarie C. Nugent Head and James C. MarlasMary H. and James H. Ottaway, Jr.Robert S PirieJoanna ProsserDr. Susan and Dr. Irwin RichmanRichard E. Riegel, IIIDr. Andrew RomayDr. Amy Sande-Friedman*Regina and Dennis SantellaHerbert J. SchwarzSherrill Foundation/Ann Pyne*Barbara ShulmanAnnaliese SorosBonnie Stacy*Elizabeth StaffordEleanor and Charles W. StendigRobert A.M. Stern ArchitectsStephanie StokesMolly F. Stockley*Luke SysonLee Talbot*Ellen and William S. TaubmanC. Thomas Tenney, Jr.

Douglas Dodds and Barbara Nessim

Donors and Special Events 53

Lynn ThommenGayle TillesRalph Van KleekDr. Stefanie and Daniel S. Walker Dr. Ian WardropperJohn L. and Sue Ann Weinberg

FoundationDouglas WigdorSteven Whitesell*Susi and Peter WunschZubatkin Owner Representation

Gifts in KindCabelle Ahn*Dr. Kenneth L. AmesBard CollegeGeorgios BoudalisMuseum of Fine Arts, Houston

/Bonnie CampbellDr. Jeffrey L. CollinsErin EisenbarthThe Frick CollectionThe Cora Ginsberg GalleryDr. David JaffeeDr. Pat KirkhamDr. Ulrich LebenPatricia and Martin LevyDr. Francois LouisMaison GerardMaria Cecilia Loschiavo dos SantosMR Architecture + Decor Michelle MajerDr. Andrew MorrallMuseum of Applied Arts, BudapestRachel PerikRobert S PirieMary E. RyniecMilton Sonday/Ratti CenterDr. Susan WeberJames Zemaitis

*BGC Alumni/ae

On Thursday, April 2, 2015, Bard Graduate Center hosted the opening reception for Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of Silhouette and The Interface Experience: Forty Years of Personal Computing. Top: Aya Rodriguez-Izumi and Ayesha Williams. Bottom: Dr. Matthew Gold, Jesse Merandy, Olgu Merandy, and Dr. Kimon Keramidas.

54 Donors and Special Events

Special Events

On Monday, March 23, 2015 Bard Graduate Center hosted an exclusive first look for Fashioning the Body: An Intimate History of the Silhouette for exhibition donors and special guests. Attendees visited the galleries to preview the exhibition, followed by a private dinner and a cabaret performance at 54 Below. Fernanda Kellogg, Hilary Block and William Hamilton served as event co-chairs.

Clockwise from top left: Molly Schaefer, Fernanda Kellogg, John and Hilary Block; Ann Tartsinis, Denis Bruna and Nina Stritzler-Levine; Clark Halstead and Melinda Florian Papp; Deborah Hughes, Kevin Ryan, Bill Hamilton and Gene Meyer; Melanie Talkington and Kirsten Pedersen; Harold Koda and Denis Bruna. Photos: © Patrick McMullan

Donors and Special Events 55

Top Left: Dr. Susan Weber and Barbro S. Osher. Top Right: Dr. Ian Wardropper, Irene Aitken and Edward Lee Cave. Bottom: Dr. Peter N. Miller, Deedee Wigmore, Dr. Susan Weber; Professor Nicholas Thomas and Barbro S. Osher. Photos: Russ Livanov

56 Donors and Special Events

The 19th Annual Iris Foundation Awards Luncheon was held on Wednesday, April 22, 2015 to honor outstanding contributions to patronage and scholarship in the decorative arts. Approximately 150 guests attended to celebrate Barbro S. Osher, Sir Mark Jones, Professor Nicholas Thomas and Deedee Wigmore. All funds raised benefit the Bard Graduate Center Scholarship Fund.

Photo credits: Front cover, clockwise from top left: Commodore 64 with 1702 monitor and 1541 disk drive, 1982, Photographer: Bruce White. Reinforced bodice for an infant. France, mid-eighteenth century. Figured, brocaded silk, coated cloth, silk ribbons. Musée des Arts décoratifs, collections UFAC, Gift of Henri Lavedan, 1951, UF 51.12.96. Photographer: Jean Tholance. Chatham Square, New York, 1853-55. Daguerreotype. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005 (2005.100.173). Articulated pannier. ca.1760–70. Musée des Arts décoratifs, dépôt du Musée de Cluny—Musée national du Moyen Age. Photographer: Jean Tholance. Back cover, clockwise from top left: Barbara Nessim. Lady Van Tastic blouse for the Lady Van Heusen clothing line, 1965. Screen printed; polyester. Courtesy of the artist. Microsoft. Kinect, 2009, Photographer: Bruce White. John Rogers. Checkers up at the Farm, 1867. Painted plaster. The New-York Historical Society, Gift of Mr. Samuel V. Hoffman (1928.29). Corset. France, ca.1895–1905. Cotton satin, cotton machine lace, hand embroidery with silk cord, whalebone, metal busk, metal. Les Arts Décoratifs, collection Mode et Textile, Purchase thanks to the support of Louis Vuitton, 2012, 2012.4.3. Photographer: Jean Tholance. Apple. Macintosh Plus with external disk drive, 1986 and M0100 mouse, 1984, Photographer: Bruce White

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